Diego & Porter

An account taken from zero to 350,000 plays a month, on a format that can be repeated.

Diego & Porter

Type: Own account
Reach: 350.214 · 30 días
Plays per follower: 312 : 1
Outside the audience: 85,9%

The challenge

Build an audience from nothing, on a subject with no existing demand, and show it doesn't depend on catching one viral. Once is luck; fifteen times is a format. The second one you can sell to a brand; the first you can't.

Self-initiated. Termópilas doesn't publish client cases yet, so the brief for both of these came from the studio itself.

The process

01One verified fact per piece
Every Reel is built on a checkable historical or biological fact about the breed. Where the sources don't stretch that far, the script says so: some pieces carry a written warning that the document they recite doesn't exist and is a narrative device. The first breeder who reads it will ask.
02Generated past, cut to the present
The structure repeats: the savanna of a century ago, generated, and a hard cut to the same dog in a European flat. The closing line lands the arc. It's the skeleton of the three pieces below and of most of the catalogue.
03The same animal across two eras
The character holds across continents, across centuries, and across generated and real footage of the dogs. Without that continuity the cut to the present means nothing: you have to believe it's the same dog.
04Made to be watched on mute
Burned-in subtitles carry the whole narration. 85.9% of the reach is people who don't follow the account and arrive scrolling, almost always with no sound: if the piece needs audio to make sense, it doesn't exist.

This isn't a lucky dog account. It's a format: every piece rests on a verified fact about the breed, tells it in images and lands it with one line. The look holds them, the fact hooks them, and the fact has to be true — that's the rule everything else answers to.

@diego.and.porter ↗

Three pieces

In order of construction, not of numbers. The first expresses the thesis best; the second is the best written; the third is the most spectacular.

The address changed

The ridgeback was bred to watch open country in southern Africa.

It cuts the savanna against a European street and ends on a sofa. Past and present in the same edit.

The job description

The requirements the breed literature has repeated for a century.

Recited as if it were a contract from 1900. The script states in writing that no such document exists and that the caption can't imply otherwise.

Every job on the farm

Put up game, move cattle, hold the farm at night. Several jobs, one dog.

The pack in the dust and leopards at dusk. It ends on the same dog in a doorway, with one job left.

And one that breaks the format

Before the account had a method there was this: coming home, told from the waiting of two dogs. No fact, no structure, nothing to prove. It stays because it explains where the rest came from.

Coming home · 34 s · vertical

The result

Over a 30-day window: 350,214 plays and 134,006 viewers, with 21,000 interactions. 85.9% of the reach comes from people who don't follow the account, which works out at 312 plays for every follower — the number that matters, because it measures reach without a prior audience rather than accumulated size.

This proves reach, not clients. The account is self-run, not a commission, and turning those plays into projects is a different job from the one measured here. The pipeline has already identified where the funnel breaks — the jump from Reel to profile — and that's still open.

Something similar in mind?

Tell me what you're thinking and I'll tell you whether it can be done, how long it takes and what it would need.

Tell me about your project